Marketing Plans, 9th Edition

CHAPTER 12IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES IN MARKETING PLANNING

SUMMARY

• The implications of size and diversity on marketing planning
• The role of the chief executive in marketing planning
• The role of the strategy or planning department in marketing planning
• Organizing for marketing planning
• The marketing planning cycle
• Marketing planning timescales and horizons
• Barriers to marketing planning and how to overcome them
• Exercises to turn the theory into practice

THE IMPLICATIONS OF SIZE AND DIVERSITY ON MARKETING PLANNING

Our research has exposed some of the many myths that surround marketing planning and spelled out the conditions that must be satisfied if any company is to have an effective marketing planning system.¹–⁶ These are:

1. Any closed-loop marketing planning system (but especially one that is essentially a forecasting and budgeting system) will lead to entropy of marketing and creativity. Therefore, there has to be some mechanism for preventing inertia from setting in through the over-bureaucratization of the system.
2. Marketing planning undertaken at the functional level of marketing, in the absence of a means of integration with other functional areas of the business at general management level, will be largely ineffective.
3. The separation of responsibility for operational and strategic marketing planning will lead to a divergence of the short-term thrust of a business at the operational level from the long-term objectives of the enterprise as a whole. This will encourage ...